Her husband had fewer opportunities of getting drink and, on the whole, they lived happily. Possessing a superior education herself and having moved before her marriage in respectable society, she brought up her daughter very differently from what might have been expected from their circumstances, and Jeanie, despite her home-spun dress, had acquirements and manners that qualified her to move in any station of life. As already stated, on the Monday morning Morison had gone to assist in running logs out of the creek. On the evening of the succeeding day his employer settled with him for the season’s work, and, in addition to the small balance of wages that was coming to him, gave him a few pieces of pork to take home and, fatal parting gift, a bottle of rum. He left the raftsmen in high spirits, an able-bodied if not very active man, taking the track that led to his humble dwelling. What followed no human eye witnessed. He never reached his home, and the searching-party that morning had discovered his body a few yards from the creek, stretched upon the ground, with his face immersed in a pool of water--a pool only an inch or so in depth, left by the melting of the snow and gathered in a cavity formed by the roots of a tree. Had he, when he stumbled and fell, moved his head ever so little, he would have breathed and lived. The more than half empty bottle, found in his stony grasp, showed he had been too overcome to stir a hairsbreadth, and there, in a basin of water, so small that a squirrel could have leaped it; so shallow that a robin, in pruning his wings, could have stepped through without wetting a feather; this stalwart man, before whose axe the loftiest pines had fallen and whose vigorous oar had stemmed the rapids of the Chateaugay, had ignominiously met his death, within hail of the faithful wife and loving daughter who were anxiously waiting his return. Jeanie, in going home the preceding evening, had unconsciously passed within a few paces of the body which once contained her father’s spirit. On finding it, damp from the exposure of a day and two nights, the searching party had made the body as presentable as possible, and sent ahead one of their number to break, as gently as might be, the news to the wife and daughter. With what success he, who was chosen on account of his smooth tongue, acquitted himself, the reader knows.